Wan Nurshazwani Wan Zakaria

Quantitative Analysis of Hand Movement in Badminton

This paper focuses on the development of a mobile measurement device to evaluate the bending and flexion of a Badminton player’s hand. Badminton can be classified as a fast racket based sports. A human eyes alone is not capable of capturing all these movements. The usage of high processing optometric system is expensive and large in size. Thus, this paper proposes development of wearable measurement device to analyse badminton player’s movements. This project involves the designing of a wearable sensor system that measure the players grasping action. A number of flex sensors is attached to a glove to acquire readings from the movement of the players hand and fingers. Experiments were conducted to determine the feasibility of each sensor towards the design of the new measurement device. The experiment results exhibit the capabilities of the bend sensors to provide accurate information regarding hand and finger movement activity.

Integration of tilt sensors as a device for monitoring rehabilitation process

This paper proposes a post-stroke rehabilitation system for hemiparetic-arm based on the application of tilt sensors. The study focuses on designing, developing and simulating the results. The result is documented for the purpose of post-processing and progressive status tracking. The subject needs to wear a set of sensors over the palm while performing a few basics arm movement. The data will be converted into series of readable data and will be displayed on android based smart phone. The experiment demonstrates the capabilities of the sensors to produce extended information regarding hand movement activities. It is believed that the system offers more information than conventional method and also the ability to improve training quality, results and patients progress. For initial proof of concept, the system will be tested to a healthy normal subject.

Dendritic cell recognition using template matching based on one-dimensional (1D) Fourier descriptors (FD)

Identification of Dendritic Cell (DC) particularly in the cancer microenvironment is a unique disclosure since fighting tumor from the harnessing immune system has been a novel treatment under investigation. Nowadays, the staining procedure in sorting DC can affect their viability. In this paper, a computer aided system is proposed for automatic classification of DC in peripheral blood mononuclear cell (PBMC) images. Initially, the images undergo a few steps in preprocessing to remove uneven illumination and artifacts around the cells. In segmentation, morphological operators and Canny edge are implemented to isolate the cell shapes and extract the contours. Following that, information from the contours are extracted based on Fourier descriptors, derived from one dimensional (1D) shape signatures. Eventually, cells are classified as DC by comparing template matching (TM) of established template and target images. The results show that the proposed scheme is reliable and effective to recognize DC.

A Pilot Study of Embedding Android Apps with Arduino for Monitoring Rehabilitation Process

This paper proposes the monitoring of a post-stroke rehabilitation activities via Android smart phones. The study focuses on designing the hardware, developing the software and simulating the results in interactive manner. The result is documented for the purpose of post-processing and progressive status tracking. Furthermore, the interactive output may motivate the patients to keep on using this system for rehabilitation. The subject needs to wear a set of sensors over the palm while performing a few basics arm movement. The data will be converted into series of readable data and then transferred to the smart phone via Bluetooth. The experiment demonstrates the capabilities of the sensors to produce information and also the Android Apps in responding such hand movement activities. It is believed that the system offers more information than conventional method and also the ability to improve training quality, results and patients progress. For initial proof of concept, the system will be tested to a healthy normal subject.

Forward kinematics analysis of a 5-axis RV-2AJ robot manipulator

This paper presents the forward kinematics analysis for the Mitsubishi Melfa RV-2AJ industrial robot with a five degree of freedom (DOF) revolute joints. The kinematics problem is defined as the transformation from the joint space to the Cartesian space and vice versa. An analytical solution using Denavit-Hartenberg (D-H) representation to describe the position and orientation of the robot end-effector is presented. Several lab experiments to verify the developed kinematics equations have been conducted. In this study, the developed kinematics solutions were found to be accurate (98.68%) compared to the real robot. These findings have important implication for developing dynamic simulation model that can be used to evaluate position and force control algorithm.

A study on the ergonomic assessment in the workplace

Ergonomics has gained attention and take into consideration by the workers in the different fields of works recently. It has given a huge impact on the workers comfort which directly affects the work efficiency and productivity. The workers have claimed to suffer from the painful postures and injuries in their workplace. Musculoskeletal disorders (MSDs) is the most common problem frequently reported by the workers. This problem occurs due to the lack of knowledge and alertness from the workers to the ergonomic in their surroundings. This paper intends to review the approaches and instruments used by the previous works of the researchers in the evaluation of the ergonomics. The two main assessment methods often used for ergonomic evaluation are Rapid Upper Limb Assessment (RULA) and Rapid Entire Body Assessment (REBA). Popular devices are Inertial Measurement Units (IMU) and Microsoft Kinect.

Stabilization of Inverted Pendulum: A Multirate Output Feedback Based Discrete Time Sliding Mode Control

This paper presents the application of multirate output feedback with discrete time sliding mode control (SMC) for controlling the inverted pendulum system. The SMC are well known as completely insensitive to parameter variations and external disturbance. Normally, in order to design controller, the state feedback from the entire state variable is utilized. However not all of the state feedbacks are always available. Therefore, the concept of the multirate output feedback (MROF) in which the output state that are always available at any situation is proposed. The nominal plant model for inverted pendulum system is fourth order with additional of external disturbance. Simulation results verify the proposed controller’s performance even though nonlinearity present in the inverted pendulum system.

Implementation of IMU sensor for elbow movement measurement of Badminton players

This paper gives an insight on the design and development of a mobile measurement device to measure the elbow joint movement of a Badminton player. Badminton is one of the fastest racket-based sport. Since a human eye alone is not capable of capturing all these fast movements the usage of high processing optometric system became a popularity but the downside is these systems are expensive and large in size. The proposed solution is to develop a reasonably cheap and small size mobile measurement device utilizing the miniature sensor technology which can perform the task capturing the badminton players movements just as an optometric system will do. This proposed device will use the MPU6050 IMU unit to measure the rotational angle of the elbow joint where the data fusion between the accelerometer and gyro will be performed by the inboard MPU6050 DMP. Experiments were conducted to verify the reliability and feasibility of IMU sensor towards the design of this proposed measurement device. The experiments result shows promising results of the usability of the IMU sensor in measuring the rotational angle of the players elbow joint.

A Hybrid Architecture for Vision-Based Obstacle Avoidance

This paper proposes a new obstacle avoidance method using a single monocular vision camera as the only sensor which is called as Hybrid Architecture. This architecture integrates a high performance appearance-based obstacle detection method into an optical flow-based navigation system. The hybrid architecture was designed and implemented to run both methods simultaneously and is able to combine the results of each method using a novel arbitration mechanism. The proposed strategy successfully fused two different vision-based obstacle avoidance methods using this arbitration mechanism in order to permit a safer obstacle avoidance system. Accordingly, to establish the adequacy of the design of the obstacle avoidance system, a series of experiments were conducted. The results demonstrate the characteristics of the proposed architecture, and the results prove that its performance is somewhat better than the conventional optical flow-based architecture. Especially, the robot employing Hybrid Architecture avoids lateral obstacles in a more smooth and robust manner than when using the conventional optical flow-based technique.

Visualization on Colour Based Flow Vector of Thermal Image for Movement Detection during Interactive Session

Recently thermal imaging is exploited in applications such as motion and face detection. It has drawn attention many researchers to build such technology to improve lifestyle. This work proposed a technique to detect and identify a motion in sequence images for the application in security monitoring system or outdoor surveillance. Conventional system might cause false information with the present of shadow. Thus, methods employed in this work are Canny edge detector method, Lucas Kanade and Horn Shunck algorithms, to overcome the major problem when using thresholding method, which is only intensity or pixel magnitude is considered instead of relationships between the pixels. The results obtained could be observed in flow vector parameter and the segmentation colour based image for the time frame from 1 to 10 seconds. The visualization of both the parameters clarified the movement and changes of pixel intensity between two frames by the supportive colour segmentation, either in smooth or rough motion. Thus, this technique may contribute to others application such as biometrics, military system, and surveillance machine.